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Friday, April 25, 2014

D&D Campfire Stories: Goblins Abound!

Image:
forgottenrealms.wikia.com

I asked my Facebook community to tell me their best Goblin stories. Here are a few of the responses:

- I like playing my Goblin PC with his "ridiculously wide brimmed hat" and scabbard that's too big for his sword. He believes he's a Goblin paragon who stands for what all Goblins should. He's super effective at killing horses and is afraid of written words of course.

- Long ago we forced some Goblins into a small cave and then proceeded to hole them up in it. We build a massive fire and wanted to deal with them via smoke inhalation. It took out a good 15 of the buggers before the rest stumbled outside to be cut down.

- Our party needed to investigate an unfinished tower used by a necromancer to instill eternal night. Me, being a rogue, sneaked my way to the top, accompanied by the Shifter warden. On the top floor we see two Goblins crouched over a book, studying it. The warden and I run up to the two Goblins and threw them off the top floor of the tower. The warden rolled a 20, which essentially reduced his Goblin to a puddle, and I rolled a 16, landing the Goblin pretty much at the entrance to the tower. We healed up that Goblin, who had only suffered a broken arm, leg, and a couple ribs, and he became a wonderful minor ally.

- Some very funny scenes but I think this was the best: The low level magic user in the party was running out of spells in front of an attacking group of Goblins. He panicked and dove down a well screaming "Why am I out front!!?". The Goblins never touched him, but he took 10 points of damage from the fall into the well.

- I was running a generic dungeon crawl into a Dwarven mine overrun by the loathsome vermin. Now when the party came up to the entrance they saw that there were some Goblins guarding the cave with lots of mining equipment and barrels lying about the base of the rocky mountain side. The party noticed that the rocks on the mountain seemed a little loose so of course their first reaction was to hurl a fireball at it to "make it rain" for the unfortunate little green cretins. They successfully created the avalanche and killed most of the Goblins but the boulders kept coming towards the group. As I advised the group to start making Reflex rolls the Warforged member of the party asked if he could try catching the boulders instead and knock them away. It peaked my interest so I allowed it and like a strongman/magic-robot hybrid he used his strength to knock them out of the way, actually rolling high enough on the last boulder that he caught it and then threw it at the last living Goblin, leaving a red and green stain

- I had a friend which I played D&D together with when I first started playing. We had a lot of trouble with the Goblin layer in B2 "Keep of the Borderlands". When he ran it for his grandfather who had been in World War II, he did amazingly. He showed us the efficiency of Molotov cocktails and how to take cover. Oh, and we found out the importance of having some sort of ranged weapon.

- I recently had a segment of a dungeon full of Goblins. I gave the team a puzzle to solve, but they were having trouble with it. They decided they would interrogate a Goblin for the answer to the puzzle, but decided that "keeping one alive" meant "burn him until he has 1 HP left and then ask him questions". By the end they were left with a gurgling, charred Goblin clinging to life by a thread because it kept making a constitution save and not dying from fire damage. It was quite funny, in a very schadenfreude kind of way.

- During Seekers of the Ashen Crown, my PCs actually sprang for a Raise Dead for a Hobgoblin. If you know the module, it makes you absolutely love those Goblins.

- I was DMing a short adventure for my twelve year old daughter who was playing for the first time. She was going solo into a Goblin’s den to retrieve a child who had been kidnapped from the local village. Roughly half-way in, she discovered a crudely made wooden cage with a Goblin inside who seemed to have been captured by the others. Figuring out that he was more friend than foe, she got him out and together they rescued the child and sent the other goblins running!